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The Great Silence: Britain from the Shadow of the First World War to the Dawn of the Jazz Age

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In Virginia Woolf's MRS DALLOWAY, the character of Peter Walsh decides that the few years immediately after the Great War were "somehow very important"; Juliet Nicholson's powerful new cultural history of Great Britain during the period from 1918 to 1920, remind us just how very important that period was. Nicholson's method is to center her study around the lives of thirty-some figures, ranging from royalty and the aristocracy to figures important in the arts and the military, and even the working class. Her style seems initially meandering but as you get the hang of it you see the deeper patterns underneath, as she cleverly structures these figures' lives around the nation's major milestones in articulating the meaning of the War to End All Wars, where one in seven British men of the age of service died. Her choices for her dramatis personae are terrific, and often surprising: we don't hear that much about the Woolfs, Lytton Strachey, or even about her grandparents Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, for example (though those very familiar figures are all in here nonetheless), but rather quite a bit about the great memoirist Vera Brittain and the novelist Winifred Holtby. And most of the stories here have been rarely (if ever) fully told, and yet are of crucial interest to anyone interested in modernism or the InterWar period and here told with great skill: the first graduation of women from Oxford; the sensational glorification by Lowell Thomas of the exploits of T.E. Lawrence after Lawrence's exploits in Arabia and the Middle East but before the publication of THE SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM; the selling and destruction of Devonshire House, which formed the model for the similar fate of Marchmain House in BRIDESHEAD REVISITED; and, most crucial of all, the decision to set two minutes' observation of silence throughout the Empire on Remembrance Day.

There is material here for modernist and twentieth-century scholars to mine for years to come. The book reminded me of nothing so much as the excellent histories of the war itself by Paul Fussell (THE GREAT WAR AND MODERN MEMORY) and Samuel Hynes (A WAR IMAGINED) from decades previous, which speaks impressively of Nicholson's achievement. There are a few minor errors here and there that I hope will be cleaned up for the US paperback (for example, Katherine Mansfield is described here as a "novelist"), but this well-crafted, beautifully detailed study is exceptionally rich with golden historical and cultural ore. It has been a bit oddly marketed for its publication in the USA (the cover photograph doesn't seem to give you much of a sense of the weightiness of the book's subject), but this fine study should absolutely find its audience among those who study or are captivated by the modernist period.

Much history taught in public schools is macro-history, with pupils required to remember names, dates, places, important events and of course, important people. That became the fashion likely because of the constraints of time. There is so much students must learn that concentration on the details is left for specialty classes at University. But what is it that really shapes a nation's destiny and forms it's national character? Well, it's the little things that do that and when you study them you can better understand the trajectory of a country's history.

I happen to enjoy the details of history and so was delighted to read Juliet Nicolson's fine social history of Great Britain covering the two years immediately following the end of WWI. Since wars are massively disruptive, their end generally entails massive social and economic changes for both the victor and the vanquished. Most reasonably well-educated Americans know about the economic and social upheavals that took place in Germany, Russia, and to a lesser extent, Austria-Hungary following the First World War. Fewer know much about the effects of the war on Great Britain with many assuming that as the victor, it emerged relatively unscathed except for its battlefield losses.

Well, in The Great Silence, Nicolson puts the lie to that notion. Using anecdote, she shows how the war affected all classes of British society from the humblest servants all the way up to the royal family. And it did change them all. But it wasn't all negative. There were many great advances not just socially, but also in science and in technology which resulted in a more restless, but ultimately a freer and slightly less class-ridden society. One of the most fascinating chapters in my view is how surgeon Howard Gillies reconstructed the faces of men who had been shattered in the war giving many of them back the opportunity to lead productive lives.

The author often alludes to social changes that many at the time thought presaged the breakdown of morality. Women entering the workforce by the millions, a decrease in church membership and attendance, more open sexuality including that of the homosexual variety, an increase in the use of contraception, an increase in drug and alcohol abuse, and a less kowtowing attitude by the lower classes toward the gentry. There was also a more militant attitude among the working classes; in places that attitude was openly and avowedly Marxist.

I personally don't care much about some of the gentry I am introduced to in this book, but yet what they did and what they thought still mattered a great deal in the Great Britain of that time and so had a bearing on the eventual direction of the country. And not just the political direction but the cultural direction as well.

I like the way Nicolson has chosen to bracket the period she covers between the anger and uncertainty that enveloped the country at war's end and the national catharsis occasioned by the burial of the Unknown Soldier in Westminster Abbey. Every segment of society was included in that ceremonial event and it brought king and commoner together, if only briefly, in a way which gave the nation closure and allowed it to move forward.

If you enjoy reading about the minutiae that are the building blocks of the Big Picture, then I highly recommend this well-written and fascinating book.

The Great Silence" is Juliet Nicholson's second book, after publishing "The Perfect Summer" in 2007. The first book was a social history of that glorious summer of 1911, the first summer after the ending of the Victorian and Edwardian ages.

With "Silence", Nicholson has returned with a meticulously written view of the two years in England after the end of "The Great War" in 1918. British soldiers returned after demob to their homes but in many cases, their lives would never be the same after four years in the trenches in France. So many men - who had marched gaily off to war in 1914 - had been killed or badly wounded, both in body and in spirit. So many women lost their sons, husbands, brothers, and fathers. An entire generation of young men were decimated in the four years of war.

Nicholson writes about all strata of British society, both "above" stairs and "below" stairs. Some of the people she interviewed were children in 1919 and are alive today. She also relied on written histories, both personal and academic. All together, Nicholson takes the reader back to that two year post-war period that saw the beginnings of the "Roaring '20's" with a national obsession for dancing and drinking by all levels of society. She also writes about the toll the "Spanish Flu" had on those at home who caught it from returning soldiers.

Nicholson is a very good and controlled writer. This book is not yet available in the States and I had to order it from Amazon/UK. It is a wonderful look at a very interesting time in British society.

When we study history we often jump directly from World War I to the Roaring Twenties, paying little or no attention to the transition period between. Juliet Nicolson's The Great Silence ably chronicles the years 1919-1920 in Britain (with occasional excursions elsewhere). Readers who enjoyed her earlier work The Perfect Summer will be glad to see that Nicolson has followed much the same format here: telling in roughly chronological order the events of the time as experienced by well known and unknown figures of the time.

The 1919-1920 period saw the ending of one world and the beginning of another. Along with the lives of millions of people, World War I destroyed or at least altered much of Europe's political, cultural, and military establishment. Nicolson does an able job chronicling the physical losses felt by so many people in England during and after the war: families who lost sons, husbands, and fathers, and soldiers who were horribly wounded and disfigured. Advances in medical care meant more men survived terrible shattering wounds, but at the price of becoming objects of fear and disgust to many when they returned home missing limbs or parts of their faces. Women found new work opportunities but struggled to deal with men who, even if they were not physically wounded, often suffered what we now call PTSD.

In 1919 and 1920 there were also plenty of hints about the new world that was taking shape. Jazz music was introduced to London ballrooms, and Coco Chanel began her long and celebrated career. New technologies like airplanes and motorcars were becoming more reliable and more common. Relationships between upper, middle, and lower classes were now much more complicated, with strikes even the finest London establishments and many noble households having to cope with a servant shortage. Sexual mores were looser, and campaigns for legalized contraception began.

Nicolson is highly skilled in her ability to depict these many changes through one telling anecdote after another. Many of the characters she uses are well known: The King and Queen, Lawrence of Arabia, Lady Astor, Lady Diana Cooper, and Lady Ottoline Morrell. Others are more obscure, such as Eric Horne, a veteran butler who found himself out of work after fifty years. Whether they were famous or not, Nicolson tells all of their stories with sympathy and perception.

The Great Silence is a fine work of social history. I hope that we will see much more from Nicolson in the future.

Juliet Nicolson has a gift for capturing the texture of British life at pivotal moments. Her previous book, THE PERFECT SUMMER, focuses, as the book's subtitle attests, on "England 1911, Just Before the Storm."The Perfect Summer: England 1911, Just Before the Storm THE GREAT SILENCE covers a two-year period beginning with the Armistice in 1918 up to the beginnings of the Jazz Age. As in the earlier volume, she tells the story through a diverse cast of characters (31 dramatis personae are listed in an Appendix). Clearly drawing from diaries, letters, and newspaper accounts without tediously quoting them at length, Nicolson gives vivid insights into the thinking and perceptions of both the famous (David Lloyd George, Nancy Astor, Coco Chanel, T.S. Eliot, T.E. Lawrence, and The Prince of Wales, to name a few) and a large swath of highly articuale "common folk" (such as Tom Mitford, one of England's war dead and the much-doted-upon sibling of the famous Mitford sisters).

Taken together, this is a moving portrait of a world gone inexplicably wrong, of devastation upon devastation (virtually every British family lost someone to war or the inluenza epidemic that followed it). A world torn between its need to forget and its greater need to heal and move on. Chapters bear simple titles that map the painful progress: Wound, Shock, Denial, Acknowledgment, Anger, Hopelessness, Performing, Honesty, Silence, Release, Expectation, Yearning, Dreaming, Surviving, Resignation, Hope, Trust, and Acceptance. It's a portrait of a shrinking world, of the relinquishing of old forms (that no longer work) and the blind, desperate struggle to find a "new way." Nicolson is neither morose nor naive. The "new way," modernity, brings with it its own set of problems to face and resolve.

One can't read this story without thinking of contemporary parallels and lessons not learned--hopelss wars, shell-shock (rebaptized as PTSD), warrior suicides, epidemics (AIDS), an expanding divide between the wealthy and the poor, and a frenzy for distraction. If there is hope in Nicolson's story it is in the human capcity to sacrifice, start anew, and survive.

English Literature professors should consider assigning THE GREAT SILENCE as background reading to students studying the birth of modernism: Joyce, Eliot, Woolf, Forster, Ford Maddox Ford, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner (especially for his neglected war novel A FABLE). In this regard, THE GREAT SILENCE reminds me of another great book (still in print and available from Amazon), RITES OF SPRING: THE GREAT WAR AND THE BIRTH OF THE MODERN AGE by Modris Eksteins.Rites of Spring : The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age

Juliet Nicholson, coming from a very upper-class background, attempts, in "The Great Silence," to give an overall view of what life in Britain was like in the two years immediately following the end of what the British called "The Great War." In some ways she succeeds brilliantly. For example, when she writes about the thousands of young men who returned from the Front with badly scarred or hideously mangled faces, her description of the work done by the New Zealander, Harold Gillies, who in essence became the father of plastic surgery, is absolutely fascinating.

On the other hand, Ms Nicholson cannot help but reveal her hereditary bias. One chapter on Lady this and Lord that---their grand ballroom parties and latest fashions, their gossip about each other and the royal family, their petty complaints and their adulterous affairs---would have been sufficient. But regrettably, that is not the case with "The Great Silence." Despite what I believe were her sincere intentions to represent all segments of society during this infinitely sad, intensely vivid, and utterly unique slice of British history, the narrative often gets bogged down with details about the social, political, and cultural elite.

In addition, she repeatedly uses the term "Chinaman" when referring to someone of Chinese origin. Is she not aware that many people find that word not only archaic but highly objectionable, bordering on racist?

Disclosure: I am a lifelong Anglophile, who has lived and worked in London, watched virtually every Masterpiece Theater mini-series from the UK, from "Upstairs Downstairs" to "William & Mary," and returns to that country on a regular basis. My favorite garden of all time is Sissinghurst Castle Garden, the heavenly creation of Juliet Nicholson's grandparents, Vita Sackville-West and Sir Harold Nicholson. I picked up "The Great Silence" with the highest hopes and expectations---which may, in part, account for my overall disappointment with the book.

That said, if you are an Anglophile and/or a student of British history, you would do well to at least give "The Great Silence" a try.

THE GREAT SILENCE spans the time period from August 1918 to November 1920, i.e. two months prior to the armistice that ended The Great War (World War One) to two years after the cessation of hostilities.

THE GREAT SILENCE is a narrative survey of Great Britain's collective coming to terms with the end of the war and its after effects.

"The Great Silence" refers to the two minutes of silence observed throughout the country at 11:00 AM on November 11, 1919 to commemorate the end of the conflict and to remember the dead (Chapter 9).

THE GREAT SILENCE, by Juliet Nicolson, is perhaps at its best when it discusses the widespread repercussions of the war, e.g. the return home of thousands of soldiers who lost limbs or were facially disfigured, the labor unrest, the remarkable post-war rise to fame of T.E. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia"), the flu pandemic of 1918, the introduction of women's suffrage, and the advent of jazz. The book is perhaps less successful, at least for non-Brits (such as myself), when it focuses on the coping responses of individuals who are well-known in British memory and less so outside the country. As examples, I wasn't particularly fascinated that the Duke of Devonshire had to sell his London great-house and blow-up a large, expensive-to-maintain (and famous) greenhouse - Paxton's Great Conservatory - on his country estate because of rising taxes, or that socialite Lady Diana Cooper fell through a skylight, broke her leg, and had to attend the various victory balls while sitting on a concealed bath chair, or that another socialite, Ottoline Morrell, plagued with a philandering husband and a severe case of facial psoriasis, lusted after a new, young employee working on her estate as a stonemason.

The volume contains two sections comprising 37 photographs that usefully illustrate the various aspects and personalities of the overall topic, and one particularly powerful image, "Grief", at the very beginning.

Notwithstanding my few reservations about the book for the reasons given, THE GREAT SILENCE should prove to be an interesting and informative read for anyone with even a modicum of interest in Great Britain, the British Empire, and British or English history. I actually enjoyed it more than I thought I would.

Really darling, the entire book is rather shallow. After reading the NY Times review I was expecting an in depth examination of the human consequences of the Great War, but only one slim chapter was dedicated to those who were maimed or wounded. Additionally, when examining this perspective, Nicholson chose to focus on the surgeons, nurses, and other caregivers, rather than the individuals directly concerned. It was a missed opportunity to learn the thoughts and opinions of those who made the penultimate sacrifice. The rest of the book tends to focus on society names, such as Lady Diana Cooper and her self-pitying moans, the Duke of Portland's issues with his estates and homes, costume parties, etc. When citing the experiences of the common people, Nicholson doesn't provide closure to their stories, but tends to take snippets from their diaries and memoirs, leaving the reader to wonder how the drama ended, i.e., did Billy die of influenza or Margaret see her much loved father again, etc.

This book is an excellent companion to this author's previous work "The Perfect Summer", which tells of life in England in the last years before the tragedy of the war. Here we are told the tales of what occurred to people in the aftermath of that conflict, and on to the second anniversary of the Armistice on Novemger 11, 1920, when the body of Britain's Unknown Soldier was entombed in Westminster Abbey.

We are given glimpses of the lives of many people, from the highest levels of society to those who were "in sevice" to the aristocracy. There is an unbalance of treatment of these disparate classes, with more emphasis put on the former rather than the latter. That is not the fault of the author, I believe, but rather the result of well-known people being more written about, and also leaving their own writings about the times in which they lived.

Many famous names parade across the pages of this book, such as Winston Churchill, Coco Chanel, Thomas hardy, Robert Graves, and countless others. There are also those who are not well-known, such as Tommy Atkins, who had the fortune (or misfortune) to have the same name as the "hero" of Rudyard Kipling's poem, wherein the people say "throw him out, the brute, but it's savior of his country when the guns begin to shoot.

Just as its predecessor was, this is a book of excellent social history, and while you may not like some of the poeple you meet within its pages, the author certainly conveys a vivid picture of the mood of Britain just after the war. It reminds me of some of the early scenes in "Chariots of Fire" that showed returned servicemen in need, and the problems of adjustment they faced. Perhaps this author will give us more books that cover specific times in British history, If she does, I will certainly read them!

Juliet Nicholson has that rare ability to recreate an historic period, making it so real that we feel as though we are living it. The theme of this perfectly written book is the effect that World War I had on England, more specifically the silence that fell over this island nation after the destruction of a huge majority of the men of England. But it is far more than the agony of dealing with the deaths of almost a million young men and older soldiers. This is a book about survival and how England coped with attempting to find a plane of recovery. Nicholson's writing is filled with references to speeches and poems and writings that dealt with the sorrow: 'This book aims to discover what happened to that peaceful pre-war society after the intervening gash of war years and the death or injury of more than two and a half million men. How had society changed and how were people adapting or failing to adapt to that change. In 1920 the journalist Philip Gibbs wrote of "fits of profound depression alternating with a restless desire for pleasure" I want to know what kind of sound was made by the hinge that linked those two sensibilities.'

What follows is a careful examination of people's responses to the devastation economically, physically, psychologically, and spiritually to that time, a time not unlike a post-apocalyptic period when death had become so common a concept that many of the populace embraced the wildness of the Roaring 20s that stepped across the Atlantic from the United States to escape its dominion. How does a country bereft of men find the continuation of family and reproduction of children? The Suffragettes moved into power in all forms of the country's business because of the need to fill the gaping holes left from the loss of manpower. Nicholson documents specific items and periods and movements that resulted from the aftermath of the Great War and even provides photographs of the ruins that stained the lives of all the inhabitants of England. 'Fighting and death had only been a part of it. The delayed response to sights and sounds, the mutilation, the hammering of guns experienced by those returning was just beginning. Would any of them recover? Would any of them find a lasting peace? Would a healing silence ever come to them, as they lay awake at night, trying to forget? This is a book about the pause that followed the cataclysm; the interval between the falling silent of the guns and the roaring of the 1920s.'

Nicholson has the gift to make reportage into a novel. Her chapters are name Shock, Denial, Hopelessness, Dreaming, Surviving, Hope, Acceptance: 11 November 1920 etc - and in separating the various realms of response of the nation she offers us individual reports as well as surveys of groups of people and classes and how England was forever changed. It is a beautifully written document, one that carries far more power than most books about that period, and one that is especially potent at this time when we are all so surrounded by wars around the globe. A powerful and informative book. Grady Harp, October 10